Quick Hits

Posted At : November 11, 2009 10:07 AM | Posted By : name
Related Categories: QUICK HITS

Shel Holrz offers up some thoughts on what best practice employee communications looks like in the social media age. I particularly like this: "Show employees who's saying what, right now. Employees already participate in the networks and communities aligned with their interests. Some may be interested in engaging elsewhere, such as communities they've never heard of where the company or its brands are being discussed.... Ideally, companies will let employees see, in as close to real time as possible, what the members of those communities are saying about the company."

A new global survey from McKinsey finds that "despite the global economic downturn, a greater proportion of executives than last year say large corporations make a positive contribution to the public good." Those same executives think the economic crisis has increased the public's expectations of business, and see business benefits in greater social and political engagement.

Yet another article, this one in The Guardian by Mark Borkowski, focuses on the threat to corporate reputations--and PR people's peace of mind--from Google Sidewiki. But this one draws the right conclusion: "Applying communication's ancient conventions and old codes of conduct to the new world of parallel influence will only accelerate the inconsequence of traditional marketers.... The only answer for PR folk is to take a more active role in being brand custodians, representing a higher degree of brand and reputation management. Ad agencies once proactively shaped vision but now PR is demonstrably just as capable at understanding and cultivating future thinking, if not more so. PR has always engaged in a two-way conversation and should be capitalizing on this to earn its clients' trust. SideWiki is a call to arms."

Australian blogger Bob Crawshaw offers up 10 steps to engaging communities using social media.

The U.K.'s Daily Telegraph reports that "an executive has won the right to sue his employer on the basis that he was unfairly dismissed for his green views after a judge ruled that environmentalism had the same weight in law as religious and philosophical beliefs." Sounds reasonable to me. Not because I think environmentalism is a religion or a faith, but because I never quite understood why religious views deserved a protection not available to political or philosophical views.

I've never quite understood the popularity of New York Times columnist David Brooks, who strikes me as an ordinary writer and an even more ordinary thinker, and I found his latest offering--on how social media are killing romance--particularly weak. It follows a familiar Brooksian path: he finds an anecdote that fits his pre-selected theory and then constructs his theory around the anecdote. Ezra Klein offers link text a better rebuttal than I could: "Texting, he says, is naturally corrosive to imagination. But the failure of imagination here is on Brooks's part."